Ghetto Mall

Last night I went shopping with Rachel at Prince George's Plaza Mall in Hyattsville. It is just about the oddest thing I've seen, I think. Maybe not, but in terms of odd malls, this one blows them all away. Well, the mall itself is alright. It's not very big, but it's fairly clean and has good security. When you go to a mall like this though, you have a ... err ... limited selection, shall we say.

I was looking for sandals since my previous ones are falling apart quite literally. So we walk around the whole mall walking into shoe stores, but none of them had sandals. They tended to be sportsy stores with shoes limited to basketball shoes and boots, it seemed. They also had a lot of uber-cool sporting apparel for men like jerseys and big basketball shorts.

The oddest thing by far was when we went to Hecht's. The whole first floor was nothing but women's apparel. I said, "Wouldn't it be funny if the whole store was women's stuff?" So we go up to the second floor, and sure enough, I'm viciously assaulted by panties and bras. A whole department store with no men's clothing! Besides that most of the other clothes stores were gaudy and flashy women's clothing stores.

The last store we hit finally had sandals. It was The Shoe Dept. Just a regular shoe store. No joke. They had a pair of Nunn Bush leather belt-strap sandals which I liked. So that's what I got.

Is this mall a statement about society? Sure. The mall tailored itself to its audience. Is there any wonder that the stereotypical black figure we see on TV is persisted constantly in real life? Black men are encouraged to shop pretty much solely at these sporting apparel stores, because that's what's closest. I know it's fashionable or whatever, but really, that mall was RIDICULOUS!